Rain fuzzed the surface of the sea into a cloudy gray blur. Nobody spoke. A week had gone by since Quentin and Poppy came back from the Neitherlands, bearing news of the coming magical apocalypse and the true nature of the keys. The long, low-ceilinged cabin where they ate their meals was filled with the sound of drops drumming on the deck overhead, so that they would have had to practically yell at each other to be understood anyway.

They were going to find the last key. Definitely. They just weren’t sure yet precisely how they were going to do it.

“Let’s go over it again,” Eliot said, raising his voice to be heard over the rain. “These things always work by rules, you just have to figure out what they are. You went through with Julia.” He pointed at Quentin. “But you didn’t take the key with you.”

“No.”

“Could it have fallen through before the door closed? Could it be in the grass on your parents’ lawn?”

“No. Impossible.” He was almost sure. No, he was sure. The grass was like a damn putting green, they would have seen it.

“But then you”—he turned to Bingle—“you searched the room and found no key.”

“No key.”

“But just now when you two”—Quentin and Poppy—“went through to the Neitherlands, that key remained behind, here, on this side.”

“Correct,” Poppy said. “Don’t tell me it’s gone too.”

“No, we have it.”

“What happened to it when the door closed?” Quentin asked. “Did it stay hanging there in midair?”

“No, it fell on the deck when the door closed. Bingle heard it and picked it up.”

The conversation stopped, and the drumming rain filled in the silence. It was neither warm nor cold. The deck overhead was watertight, but the air was so wet that Quentin felt like he was soaked through anyway. Every surface was sticky. Everything wooden was swollen. His damn collarbone was swollen. There was a glum scraping as people shifted in their wooden chairs. Above his head Quentin heard the footsteps of whatever poor bastard was standing watch on deck.

“Maybe there was some space in between,” Quentin said. “One of those gaps between dimensions. Maybe it fell in there.”

“I thought the Neitherlands was the gap between dimensions,” Poppy said.

“It is, but there’s a different gap too. When a portal pulls apart. But we would have seen that.”

The Muntjac groaned softly as it swayed in place. Quentin wished Julia were here, but she was below with a fever that might or might not have been related to whatever else was going on with her. She’d been down ever since the fight for the last key. She lay on her bed with her eyes closed but not sleeping, breathing quickly and shallowly. Quentin went down there a few times a day to read to her or hold her hand or make her drink water. She didn’t seem to care much, but Quentin kept it up anyway. You never knew what might make a difference.

“So you searched the whole After Island,” Quentin said.

“We did,” Eliot said. “Look, maybe we should call on Ember.”

“Call Him!” Quentin said it more vehemently than he meant to. “I doubt if it’ll do much good. If that fucking ruminant could get the key He would just do it and leave us out of it.”

“But would He?” Josh asked.

“Probably. He’ll die too if Fillory goes.”

“What is Ember, anyway?” Poppy said. “I mean, I thought He was a god, but He’s not like those silver guys.”

“I think He’s a god in this world, but nowhere else,” Quentin said. “That’s my theory. He’s just a local god. The silver gods are gods of all the worlds.”

Although Quentin was still in close touch with the exalted frame of mind he’d been in when he came back from the Neitherlands, his connection to it had grown more tenuous. The urgency was still there: every morning he woke up expecting to find magic shut off everywhere like an unpaid power bill and Fillory collapsing around him on all sides like the last days of Pompeii. And they were certainly making good time, or they had been till this morning. Admiral Lacker had found, tucked away in a secret wooden locker, a marvelous sail that caught light as well as wind. Quentin recognized it: the Chatwins had one aboard the Swift. It hung slack through most of the night, limping along on whispers of moon- and starlight, but during the day it billowed out like a spinnaker in a gale and hauled the ship forward almost singlehandedly, needing only to be trimmed according to the angle of the sun.

That was all fine. But Fillory wasn’t doing its part. It wasn’t giving up the key. All the wonders seemed to be in hiding. In the past week they had reached heretofore unknown islands, stepped out onto virgin beaches, infiltrated choked mangrove swamps, even scaled a rogue drifting iceberg, but no keys presented themselves. They weren’t getting traction. It wasn’t working. Something was missing. It was almost as if something had gone out of the air: a tautness had gone slack, an electric charge had dissipated. Quentin racked his brain to think what it was.

Also it wouldn’t stop raining.

After the meeting Quentin forced himself to take a break. He lay down in his damp berth and waited for the heat from his body to propagate its way through the clammy, tepid bedclothes. It was too late to take a nap and too early to go to sleep. Outside his window the sun was dropping over the rim of the world, or it must have been, but you couldn’t tell. Sky and ocean were indistinguishable from each other. The world was the uniform gray of a brand-new Etch A Sketch the knobs of which hadn’t yet been twiddled.

He stared out at it, gnawing the edge of his thumb, a bad habit left over from childhood, his mind adrift in the emptiness.

Somebody spoke.

“Quentin.”

He opened his eyes. He must have fallen asleep. The window was dark now.

“Quentin,” the voice said again. He hadn’t dreamed it. The voice was muffled, directionless. He sat up. It was a gentle voice, soft and androgynous and vaguely familiar. It didn’t sound completely human. Quentin looked around the cabin, but he was alone.

“Who are you?” he said.

“I’m down here, Quentin. You’re hearing me through a grating in the floor. I’m down in the hold.”

Now he placed the voice. He’d forgotten it was even on board.

“Sloth? Is that you?” Did it have a name other than Sloth?

“I thought you might like to pay me a visit.”

Quentin couldn’t imagine what would have given the sloth that idea. The Muntjac’s hold was dark and smelled of damp and rot and bilge, and for that matter it smelled of sloth. All in all he would have been fine talking to the sloth just where he was. Or not talking to it at all.

And Jesus, if he could hear the sloth that clearly it must have overheard everything that happened in this cabin since they’d left Whitespire.

But he did feel bad about the sloth. He hadn’t paid very much attention to it. Frankly it was a tiny bit of a bore. But he owed it some respect, as the shipboard representative of the talking animals, and it was warm down in the hold, and it wasn’t like he had somewhere more pressing to be just now. He sighed and peeled the bedclothes off himself and fetched a candle and found the ladder that went down below.

The hold was emptier than he remembered it. A year at sea would have that effect. Black water sloshed around in a channel that ran along the floor. The sloth was a weird-looking beast, maybe four feet long, with a heavy coat of greenish-gray fur. It hung upside down by its ropy arms at about eye level, its thick curved claws hooked up over a wooden beam. Its appearance smacked of evolution gone too far. The usual pile of fruit rinds and sloth droppings lay below it in an untidy heap.

“Hi,” Quentin said.

“Hello.”

The sloth raised its small, oddly flattened head so that it was looking at Quentin right-side up. The position looked uncomfortable, but the sloth’s neck seemed pretty well designed for it. It had black bands of fur over its eyes that gave it a sleepy, raccoony look.

It squinted at the light from Quentin’s candle.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been down to see you very often,” Quentin offered.

“It’s all right, I don’t mind. I’m not a very social animal.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Abigail.”

She was a girl sloth. Quentin hadn’t realized. A hard wooden chair had been brought down to the hold, presumably in case someone was enjoying their conversation with the sloth so much that he or she just had to sit down to enjoy it even more.

“And you’ve been very busy,” she added charitably.

A long silence ensued. Once in a while the sloth masticated something, Quentin wasn’t sure what, with its blunt yellow teeth. It must be somebody’s job to come down here and feed it. Her.

“Do you mind if I ask,” Quentin said finally, “why you came on this voyage? I’ve always wondered.”

“I don’t mind at all,” Abigail the Sloth said calmly. “I came because nobody else wanted to, and we thought we should send someone. The Council of Animals decided that I would mind it the least. I sleep a great deal, and I don’t move around very much. I enjoy my solitude. In a way I am hardly in this world at all, so it doesn’t very much matter where I am in it.”

“Oh. We thought the talking animals wanted a representative on the ship. We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t take one of you along.”

“We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t send someone. It is humorous how rife with misunderstanding the world is, is it not?”

It sure was.

The sloth didn’t find the long silences awkward. Maybe animals didn’t experience awkwardness the way humans did.

“When a sloth dies, it remains hanging in its tree,” the sloth said, apropos of nothing. “Often well into the process of decomposition.”

Quentin nodded sagely.

“I did not know that.”

It wasn’t an easy ball to throw back.

“This is by way of telling you something about the way sloths live. It is different from the way humans live, and even from the way other animals live. We spend our lives in between worlds, you might say. We suspend ourselves between the earth and the sky, touching neither. Our minds hover between the sleeping world and the waking. In a sense we live on the borderline between life and death.”

“That is very different from how humans live.”

“It must seem strange to you, but it is where we feel most comfortable.”

The sloth seemed like somebody you could be frank with.

“Why are you telling me this?” he said. “I mean, I’m sure you have a reason, but I’m not making the connection. Is this about the key? Do you have an idea about how to find it?”

He didn’t know how much the sloth knew about what was going on above deck. Maybe she didn’t even know they were on a quest.

“It is not about the key,” Abigail said in her liquid, unhurried voice. “It is about Benedict Fenwick.”

“Benedict? What about him?”

“Would you like to speak with him?”

“Well, sure. Of course. But he’s dead. He died two weeks ago.”

It was still as unthinkable, almost unsayable, as it had been that first night.

“There are paths that are closed to most beings that are open to a sloth.”

Quentin supposed it went without saying that patience was a big deal when having a conversation with a sloth.

“I don’t understand. You’re going to hold a séance, and we can talk to Benedict’s ghost?”

“Benedict is in the underworld. He is not a ghost. He is a shade.” The sloth returned her head to its inverted position, a maneuver she accomplished without once dropping Quentin’s gaze.

“The underworld.” Jesus Christ. He hadn’t even realized Fillory had an underworld. “He’s in hell?”

“He is in the underworld, where dead souls go.”

“Is he all right there? Or I mean, I know he’s dead, but is he at peace? Or whatever?”

“That I cannot tell you. My understanding of human moods is imprecise. A sloth knows only peace, nothing else.”

It must be nice to be a sloth. Quentin was unsettled by the idea of Benedict in the underworld. It bothered him that Benedict could be dead but still—not alive, but what? Conscious? Awake? It was like he was buried alive. It sounded awful.

“But he’s not being tortured, right? By red guys with horns and pitchforks?” It never did to assume anything was impossible in Fillory.

“No. He is not being tormented.”

“But he’s not in heaven either.”

“I do not know what ‘heaven’ is. Fillory has only an underworld.”

“So how can I talk to him? Can you—I don’t know, put in a call? Patch me through?”

“No, Quentin. I am not a medium. I am a psychopomp. I do not speak to the dead, but I can show you the path to the underworld.”

Quentin was not sure he wanted to be shown that. He studied the sloth’s upside-down face. It was unreadable.

“Physically? I could physically go there?”

“Yes.”

Deep breath.

“Okay. I would really love to help Benedict, but I don’t want to leave the world of the living.”

“I will not force you. Indeed, I could not.”

It was spooky down in the hold, which was lightless except for the flame of Quentin’s candle, which stayed perfectly upright as the ship pitched forward and back. The hanging sloth did too—she swayed slightly, like a pendulum. Quentin’s eyes kept wandering off into the darkness. It was otherworldly down here. The ship’s curved sides were like the ribs of some huge animal that had swallowed them. Where was the underworld? Was it underground? Underwater?

The sloth chose this moment to engage in some self-grooming, which she did with her customary slowness and thoroughness, first with her tongue and then with a thick, woody claw, which she slowly and laboriously unhooked from around the beam.

“In a way”—she said, as she licked and clawed—“we sloths are like . . . small worlds . . . unto ourselves.”

Nobody could wait out a pause like a sloth. Or survive on less conversational encouragement. He wondered if to a sloth the human world appeared to move past at blinding, flickering speed—if humans looked twitchy and sped-up to her, the same way the sloth looked slowed-down to Quentin.

“There is a species of algae,” she said, “that grows only . . . in sloth fur. It accounts for our unique . . . greenish tint. The algae helps us blend in with the leaves. But it also serves . . . to nourish an entire ecological system. There is a species of moth that lives only . . . in the thick, algaerich fur . . . of the sloth. Once a moth arrives on its chosen sloth”—here she tussled with a particularly gristly knot of fur for a long minute before continuing—“its wings break off. It does not need them. It will never leave.”

Finally finished, she rehooked her claw over the beam and returned to her quiescent, upside-down state.

“They are called sloth moths.”

“Look,” Quentin said. “I want to be clear. I don’t have time to go to the underworld right now. At any other time grieving for Benedict would be the biggest thing in my life, but the universe is going through a crisis. We’re searching for a key, and there’s a lot riding on that. A lot. It could be the end of Fillory if we don’t find it. This will have to wait.”

“No time will pass while you are in the other realm. For the dead there is no change, and therefore no time.”

He couldn’t afford to get distracted. “Even if it takes no time. Anyway what good would it do? I can’t bring him back.”

“No.”

“So I hate to be blunt, but what’s the point?”

“You could offer Benedict comfort. Sometimes the living can give something to the dead. And perhaps he could offer you something too. My understanding of human emotions is . . .”

The sloth paused to ponder her choice of words.

“Imprecise?” Quentin said.

“Precisely. Imprecise. But I do not think Benedict was happy with his death.”

“It was a terrible death. He must feel very unhappy.”

“I think perhaps he wants to tell you that.”

Quentin hadn’t considered that.

“I think perhaps he could give you something too.”

The sloth regarded him with her gelatinous, glittering eyes, which seemed to pick up light from somewhere other than in the room. Then she closed them.

The ship grunted patiently as the waves beat against its hull, over and over again, monotonously. Quentin watched the sloth. By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn’t doing it. He pictured Benedict, trapped and languishing in a poorly drawn cartoon netherworld. Would he want someone to come visit him? He probably would.

Quentin felt responsible for him. It was part of being a king. And Benedict had died before he found out what the keys were for. He thought that he’d died for no reason. Imagine chewing on that for eternity.

One of the things Quentin remembered from reading about King Arthur was that the knights who had sins on their consciences never did very well on the quest for the Grail. The thing was to go to confession before you set out. You had to face yourself and deal with your shit, that’s how you got somewhere. At the time Quentin thought that that was obvious, and he never understood why Gawain and the rougher knights didn’t just suck it up, get shriven, and get on with it. Instead they blundered around getting into fights and succumbing to temptation and eventually ended up nowhere near the Grail.

But being in the middle of it, it wasn’t that obvious. Maybe Benedict’s death was—if not a sin on his conscience, exactly, then something unresolved. The sloth was right. It was weighing on his soul, slowing them all down. Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.

Well, bottom line, no time is the perfect time to visit the dead in the underworld. And if the sloth was telling the truth, he could be back before anyone knew he was gone.

“So I can do this in no time at all?” he said. “I mean, literally no time will pass here?”

“Perhaps I exaggerated. No time will pass while you are in the underworld. But you will have to make certain preparations before you go.”

“And I can come back.”

“You can come back.”

“Okay. All right.” Unless he changed he was going to be visiting the underworld in his pajamas. “Let’s get started. What do I need to do?”

“I neglected to mention, the ritual must be performed on land.”

“Oh. Right.” Thank God, he could go back to bed after all. Hell could wait. “I thought we were going right here and now. Well, so I’ll just pop down next time we get—”

There was a distant clatter of boots overhead, and a bell rang.

“We just sighted land, didn’t we,” Quentin said.

The sloth gravely closed her eyes and then opened them again: indeed, yes, we just sighted land. Quentin was going to ask her how she did that but stopped himself, because asking would mean that he’d have to sit through the answer, and he’d had about enough slothly wisdom for the time being.

Not more than an hour later Quentin was standing on a flat gray beach in the middle of the night. He’d wanted to slip off to the underworld and back quietly, unbeknownst to the rest of the gang. Then maybe he would bring it up later, just drop it into conversation that by the way, he’d been to hell and back, no big thing, why do you ask? Benedict says hi. He hadn’t planned on doing this in front of an audience.

But an audience had assembled: Eliot, Josh, Poppy, and even Julia, who had roused herself from her stupor to observe. Bingle and one of the sailors stood nearby with a long oar resting between them on their shoulders, and from the oar dangled the sloth. They had carried it out to the beach like that, like a side of beef. It had seemed the easiest way.

Of them all only Poppy didn’t seem convinced he should go.

“I don’t know, Quentin,” she said. “I’m just trying to picture it. It’s not like visiting somebody in the hospital. Get well soon, here’s a bunch of balloons to tie to the bedpost. Imagine if you were dead. Would you want the living to visit you, when you knew you couldn’t go back with them? I’m not a thousand percent sure I would. It seems a little like rubbing it in. Maybe you should let him rest in peace.”

But he wasn’t going to. What’s the worst that could happen? Benedict could send him away if he wanted. The others hugged themselves in robes and overcoats in the chilly air. The island wasn’t much more than an overgrown sandbar, flat and featureless. The tide was out, and the sea was not so much calm as limp. Every few minutes it worked up enough energy for a wave that rose up half a foot and then flopped onto the strand with a startling smack, as if to remind everyone that it was still there.

“I’m ready,” Quentin said. “Tell me what to do.”

The sloth had asked them to bring a ladder and a long, flat board from the ship. Now it instructed them to stand them up and lean the two together to form a triangle. The ladder and board didn’t want to stay like that, the triangle kept collapsing, so Josh and Eliot had to hold them up. As a former Physical Kid Quentin was used to making magic out of unpromising raw materials, but this was crude even by his standards. The crescent moon of Fillory looked down on them, flooding the scene with silver light. It rotated eerily swiftly, once every ten minutes or so, so that its horns were always pointing in a different direction.

“Now climb the ladder.”

Quentin did. Eliot grunted with the effort of keeping it upright. Quentin got to the top.

“Now slide down the slide.”

It was clear what the sloth meant. He was supposed to slide down the plank like a playground slide. Though this wasn’t a playground slide, and it was a bit of a circus act to get into position without any bars to hang on to. The slide wobbled and at one point almost collapsed, but Josh and Eliot managed to hold it together.

Quentin sat at the top of the triangle. He hadn’t imagined that his journey to the underworld would be quite this ridiculous. He’d rather hoped it would involve drawing unholy sigils in the sand in letters of fire ten feet high, and flinging open the portal to hell. You can’t win them all.

“Slide down the slide,” the sloth said again.

It was a raw pine board, so he had to scooch himself along for a few feet, but eventually he managed to slide the rest of the way to the bottom. He was ready at any moment for a splinter to stab him in the ass, but none did. His bare feet planted in the firm cold sand. He stopped.

“Now what?” he called.

“Be patient,” said the sloth.

Everyone waited. A wave flopped. A gust of wind ruffled the fabric of his pajamas.

“Should I—?”

“Try wiggling your toes a little.”

Quentin wiggled them deeper into the cold, damp beach. He was about to get up and call it a night when he felt his toes break through something into nothing, and the sand gave way, and he slid down through it.

The moment he passed beneath the sand the slide became a real slide, made of metal, with metal guardrails. A playground slide. He slid down it in total darkness, with nothing around him as far as he could tell. It wasn’t a perfect system—every time he got up a decent head of speed he would get stuck and have to scooch again, his butt squeaking loudly in the pitch-black.

A light appeared, far ahead and below him. He wasn’t moving very fast, so he had plenty of time to check it out on his way down. It was an ordinary unshaded electric light set in a brick wall. The brickwork was old and uneven and could have used some repointing. Below the light was a pair of metal double doors painted a gray-brown. They were absolutely ordinary, the kind that might have opened onto a school auditorium.

In front of it stood someone who looked too small to be standing in front of the entrance to hell. He might have been eight years old. He was a sharp-looking little boy, with short black hair and a narrow face. He wore a little-boy-sized gray suit with a white shirt, but no tie. He looked like he’d gotten fidgety in church and come outside for a minute to blow off steam.

He didn’t even have a stool to sit on, so he just stood in place as well as an eight-year-old boy can. He tried and failed to whistle. He kicked at nothing in particular.

Quentin thought it prudent to slow down and stop about twenty feet from the bottom of the slide. The boy watched him.

“Hi,” the boy said. His voice sounded loud in the silence.

“Hi,” Quentin said.

He slid down the rest of the way and then stood up, as gracefully as he could.

“You’re not dead,” the boy said.

“I’m alive,” Quentin said. “But is this the entrance to the underworld?”

“You know how I could tell you were alive?” The boy pointed behind Quentin. “The slide. It works much better if you’re dead.”

“Oh. Yes, I got stuck a few times.”

Quentin’s skin prickled just standing there. He wondered if the boy was alive. He didn’t look dead.

“Dead people are lighter,” the boy said. “And when you die they give you a robe. It’s better for sliding than regular pants.”

The bulb made a bubble of light in the darkness. Quentin had a sense of towering emptiness all around them. There was no sky or ceiling. The brick wall seemed to go up forever—did go up forever, as far as he could see. He was in the subbasement of the world.

Quentin pointed behind him at the double doors. “Is it all right if I go inside?”

“You can only go inside if you’re dead. That’s the rule.”

“Oh.”

This was a setback. You’d think Abigail the Sloth would have briefed him on that wrinkle. He didn’t relish the thought of trying to climb back up that long slide, if that was how you got back to the upper world. He seemed to remembered from being a kid that it was possible, just about, but that slide must have been half a mile long. What if he fell off? Or what if somebody died and came sliding down it while he was going up?

But it would also be a relief. He could get back to business. Back to the search for the key.

“The thing is, my friend Benedict is inside. And I need to tell him something.”

The boy thought for a minute.

“Maybe you could tell me, and then I’ll tell him.”

“I think it should come from me.”

The boy chewed his lip.

“Do you have a passport?”

“A passport? I don’t think so.”

“Yes, you do. Look.”

The boy reached up and took something out of the shirt pocket of Quentin’s pajamas. It was a piece of paper folded in half. It took Quentin a beat to recognize it: it was the passport the little girl had made for him, what was her name, Eleanor, all the way back on the Outer Island. How had it gotten into his pocket?

The little boy studied it with an eight-year-old’s version of intense bureaucratic scrutiny. He looked up at Quentin’s face to compare it with the picture.

“Is this how you spell your name?”

The boy pointed. Under his picture Eleanor had written in colored pencil, all capitals: KENG. The K was backward.

“Yes.”

The boy sighed, exactly as if Quentin had just bested him at a game of Chinese checkers.

“All right. You can go in.”

He rolled his eyes to make sure that Quentin knew that he didn’t really care if Quentin went in or not.

Quentin opened one of the doors. It wasn’t locked. He wondered what the boy would have done if he’d just barged in past him. Probably he would have transformed into some unspeakably horrible Exorcist thing and eaten him. The door opened onto a vast open space dimly lit by banks of buzzing fluorescent lights overhead.

It was full of people. Stale air and the muttering roar of thousands of conversations washed over him. The place was a gymnasium, or that was the closest analogy he could come up with off the cuff. A recreation center. The people in it were standing and sitting and walking around, but mostly what they were doing was playing games.

Right in front of him a foursome was listlessly swatting a shuttlecock back and forth over a badminton net. Farther off he could see a volleyball net set up that no one was using, and some Ping-Pong tables. The floor was heavily varnished wood and striped with the overlapping curving lines of various indoor sports, painted over each other at odd angles, in odd colors, the way they were in school gyms. The air had the empty, echoing quality of large stadiums, where sound travels a long way but doesn’t have much to bounce off of, so it just gets gray and ragged and indistinct.

The people—the shades, he supposed—all looked solid, though the artificial light washed all the color out of them. Everybody wore loose white exercise clothing. His pajamas wouldn’t look that out of place after all.

The dry air pressure pushed into his ears. Quentin resolved to take everything as it came, not think too hard, not try to figure it out, just try to find Benedict. That’s why he was here. This was a situation where you really needed a Virgil to show you around. He looked behind him, but the doors had already closed. They even had those long metal bars on them that you pressed to open instead of a doorknob.

Just then one of the doors opened, and Julia slipped inside. She looked around the room, the same way Quentin had, but without his air of utter bewilderment. Her ability to take things in stride was just awesome. Her fever and her listlessness seemed to be gone. The door closed behind her with a metallic clunk.

For a second he thought she was dead, and his heart stopped.

“Relax,” she said. “I thought you might want company.”

“Thank you.” His heart started up again. “You were right. I do. I’m so happy you’re here.”

The shades didn’t seem especially happy to be in the underworld. They mostly looked bored. Nobody was running for shots on the badminton court. They were swinging limp-wristed, and when somebody netted a shot his partner didn’t look especially pissed off about it. Mildly chagrined, maybe. At most. They didn’t care. There was a scoreboard next to the court, but no one was keeping score. It showed the final score of the game before it, or maybe the game before that.

In fact a lot of them weren’t playing the games at all, they were just talking or lying on their backs staring up at the buzzing fluorescent lights, saying nothing. The lights hardly even made sense. There was no electricity in Fillory.

“Did he take your passport?” Quentin said.

“No. He didn’t say anything at all. He did not even look at me.”

Quentin frowned at that. Weird.

“We’d better start looking,” he said.

“Let us stay together.”

Quentin had to force himself to start walking. The deeper they went into the throng, it felt like, the greater the risk that they would get stuck here forever, whatever the sloth said. They threaded their way between the different groups, sometimes stepping over people’s legs, trying not to tread on people’s hands, like it was a crowded picnic. He was worried he would attract attention by being alive, but people just glanced up at him and then looked away. It wasn’t an underworld like in Homer or Dante, where everybody was dying to talk to you.

It was more depressing than spooky, really. It was like visiting a summer camp, or a senior center, or somebody else’s office: it’s all well and good, but the knowledge that you don’t have to stay there, that you can go home at the end of the day and never come back, makes you so relieved you get dizzy. Not all the equipment was in its first youth. Some of it was actually fairly shabby—the board games had cracked leathery creases across the center where they folded up, and some of the badminton rackets were waving a loose string or two. He got his first real shock when he saw Fen.

He should have expected it. She’d been one of his guides on their trip down into Ember’s Tomb. She was the good one, the one who didn’t betray them. He barely knew her in life, but she was unmistakable, with her fishy lips and her short dykey haircut. The last time he’d seen her she was being simultaneously crushed and set on fire by a giant made of red-hot iron. Now she looked as healthy as she ever had, if a little wan, playing a slow-paced, low-pressure game of Ping-Pong. If she recognized him she didn’t show it.

Now he allowed himself to wonder the thing he’d been trying not to wonder ever since the sloth first brought it up: whether Alice was here. Part of him was yearning to see her, would have given anything if one of the faces in the crowd could just belong to her. Another part of him hoped that she wasn’t here. She was a niffin now. Maybe that counted as still alive.

There were big metal pillars here and there holding up the ceiling, and Benedict was sitting leaning against one of them, staring off into the pale, empty distance. Half a game of solitaire was arranged in front of him, but he’d lost interest in it, even though it was pretty obvious he wasn’t stuck. He could put a red five of diamonds on a six of clubs.

He looked more like the Benedict Quentin had first met in the map room, than the suntanned bravo he’d become on board the Muntjac. He was pale and thin-armed, with his old black bangs falling over his eyes. His hair had grown back. He looked like a sullen Caravaggio youth. Death made him seem younger.

Quentin stopped.

“Hello, Benedict.”

“Hello,” Julia said.

Benedict’s eyes flicked over to Quentin, then back to the distance.

“I know you can’t take me with you,” he said quietly.

The dead didn’t mince words.

“You’re right,” Quentin said. “I can’t. That’s what the sloth said.”

“So why did you come?”

Now he did look at Quentin, accusingly. Quentin had worried that he would have a gaping wound in his neck, but it was smooth and whole. He’s not a zombie, he’s a ghost, Quentin reminded himself. No, a shade.

“I wanted to see you again.”

Quentin sat down next to him and leaned back against the pillar too. Julia sat down on his other side. Together the three of them looked out at the milling throngs of dead people.

A period of time passed, maybe five minutes, maybe an hour. It was hard to keep track in the underworld. Quentin would have to watch that.

“How are you, Benedict?” Julia said.

Benedict didn’t answer.

“Did you see what happened to me?” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. Bingle said to stay on the ship, but I thought—” He didn’t finish, just frowned helplessly and shook his head. “I wanted to try some of the stuff we’d been practicing. For real, in a real fight. But the minute I stepped off the boat, tschoooo! Right in my throat. Right in the hollow of it.”

He pressed his index finger into the soft part below his Adam’s apple, where the arrow went in.

“It didn’t even hurt that much. That’s the funny thing. I thought they could pull it out. I turned around to get back on the boat. Then I realized I couldn’t breathe, so I sat down. My mouth was full of blood. My sword fell in the water. Can you believe I was worried about that? I was trying to figure out whether we could dive down later and get my sword back. Did anybody get it?”

Quentin shook his head.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Benedict said. “It was just a practice sword.”

“What happened next? You went down the slide?”

Benedict nodded.

Quentin was evolving a theory about that. The slide was humiliating, that’s what it was. Deliberately embarrassing. That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.

“So did you get the key?” Benedict said.

“I wanted to tell you about that,” Quentin said. “We did get the key. There was a big fight, and we got the key, and it turned out to be really important. I wanted you to know that.”

“But nobody else got killed. Just me.”

“Nobody else died. I got stabbed in the side.” Not much to brag about under the circumstances. “But what I wanted to tell you is that it was important, what we were doing. You didn’t die for nothing. Those keys—we’re going to use them to save Fillory. There was a point to it all. Without them all magic is going to go away, and the whole world will collapse. But we can use the keys to fix it.”

Benedict’s expression didn’t change.

“But I didn’t do anything,” he said. “My dying didn’t make a difference. I could have just stayed on the boat.”

“We do not know what would have happened,” Julia said.

Benedict ignored her again.

“He cannot hear me,” Julia said to Quentin. “Something strange is going on. No one here can see or hear me. He does not know I am here.”

“Benedict? Can you see Julia? She’s sitting right next to you.”

“No.” Benedict frowned the way he used to, like Quentin was embarrassing him. “I don’t see anybody. Just you.”

“I am like a ghost here,” she said. “A ghost among ghosts. A reverse ghost.”

What was different about Julia, that the dead couldn’t see her? It was a serious question, but not one they were going to answer right now. Instead they watched the crowd some more, and listened to the kuh-tik kuh-tak of the Ping-Pong games. For all the time they had to practice, the dead didn’t seem to be that good at it. Nobody ever tried for a slam, or a fancy serve, and the rallies only ever went a few shots before the ball hit the net or went bouncing off into the crowd.

“This whole place,” Benedict said. “It’s like somebody almost tried to make it nice, with all the games and stuff, but then they didn’t quite care enough to think it through. You know? I mean, who gives a shit? Who wants to play games forever? I’m just so bored of everything, and I haven’t even been here that long.”

Somebody. Those silvery gods, probably. Benedict kicked at his solitaire game, messing up the nice straight rows.

“You don’t even get powers. You can’t even fly. I’m not even see-through.” He held up his hand, to demonstrate his opacity, and let it drop again. “Because you know, that would have been too cool or whatever.”

“What else can you do here? Besides the games and such?”

“Not a lot.” Benedict put his hands in his hair and looked up at the ceiling. “Talk to the other shades. There’s nothing to eat, but you don’t get hungry. A few people fight or have sex or whatever. You can totally watch them do it even. But after a while, I mean, what’s the point? It’s just the new people who do it.

“Once they did a human pyramid, to try to reach up to the lights. But you can’t reach them. They’re too high. I never had sex,” he added. “In the real world. Now I don’t even want to.”

Quentin talked on for a while, filling Benedict in on everything that had been happening.

“Did you have sex with that Poppy girl yet?” Benedict said, interrupting.

“Yes.”

“Everybody said you were going to.”

They did? Julia, a ghost’s ghost, smirked.

Out of the corner of his eye Quentin couldn’t help but notice that they were attracting some attention. Nothing obvious, but a couple of people were pointing at them. A kid—he might have been thirteen—stood there watching him fixedly. Quentin wondered how he died.

“I am starting to understand,” Julia said. “It is really gone. The part of me that was human, the part of me that could die—it is gone, Quentin. I have lost it forever. That is why they canot see me.” She was talking to him, but her black eyes were fixed on the distance. “I am never going to be human again. I did not understand it till now. I have lost my shade. I suppose I knew it. I just did not want to believe it.”

He started to answer, to tell her he was sorry for what she had lost, sorry he couldn’t do more, sorry for everything that had and hadn’t happened, whatever it was. But there was so much he didn’t understand. What did it mean, losing your shadow? How did it happen? How did it feel? Was she less than human now, or more? But she held up her hand, and then Benedict spoke.

“I hope you fail,” he said suddenly, as if he’d just made a decision about it. “I hope you never find the key, and everybody dies, and the world ends. You know why? Because then maybe this place would end too.”

Then Benedict was crying. He was sobbing so hard he wasn’t making any noise. He caught his breath and started sobbing more.

Quentin put a hand on his back. Say something. Anything.

“I’m so sorry, Benedict. You died too soon. You didn’t have your chance.”

Benedict shook his head.

“It’s good I died.” He took a shuddering breath. “I was useless. It’s good it was me and not anybody else.” His voice went away to a squeak at the end.

“No,” Quentin said firmly. “That’s bullshit. You were a great mapmaker, and you were going to be a great swordsman, and it’s a fucking tragedy that you died.”

Benedict nodded at this too.

“Will you—will you say hi to her for me? Tell her I liked her.”

“Who do you mean?”

Even though his face was red from crying, and dripping with tears, Benedict’s face had all its old adolescent contempt.

“Poppy. She was nice to me. Do you think she could come visit? Down here I mean?”

“I don’t think she has a passport. I’m sorry, Benedict.”

Benedict nodded. There were more shades around the two of them now. A group was definitely gathering, and it wasn’t at all clear that their intentions were friendly.

“I’ll come back,” Quentin said.

“You can’t. That’s the rule. You can only come one time. Didn’t they take your passport? They didn’t give it back, did they?”

“No. I guess they didn’t.”

Benedict took a shaky breath and wiped his eyes on his white sleeve.

“I wish I could have stayed. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s so stupid! If I’d just waited on the boat I’d still be up there. I looked at that arrow and thought, this little stick, this little piece of wood, is taking my whole life away. That’s all my life is worth. One little stick can erase it all. That’s the last thing I thought.” He looked directly at Quentin. It was the one moment when he didn’t seem angry or ashamed. “I miss it so much. You don’t understand how much I miss it.”

“I’m so sorry, Benedict. We miss you too.”

“Listen, you better go. I don’t think they want you here.”

A whole crowd was standing around them now, silently, in a rough semicircle. Maybe it was Quentin’s nonstandard pajamas. Maybe they could just see that he was alive somehow. That kid was one of them, who’d been staring at him before. Quentin wished the shades weren’t so solid-looking.

Quentin and Benedict both stood up, with their backs to the pillar. So did Julia.

“I have something,” Benedict said, suddenly shy again. “I was going to give it back.”

He dug something out of his pocket and pressed it into Quentin’s hand. His fingers were cold, and the thing was hard and cold too. It was the golden key.

“Oh. My God.” It was the last one. Quentin held it up in both hands. “Benedict, how did you get this?”

“Quentin,” Julia said. “Is that it?”

“I had it all along,” Benedict said. “After you and Queen Julia went through the door I picked it up when no one was looking. I don’t know why. I didn’t know how to give it back. I thought maybe I’d pretend to find it. I’m sorry. I wanted to be a hero.”

“Don’t be sorry.” Quentin’s heart was hammering in his chest. This was it. They were going to win after all. “Don’t be sorry at all. It doesn’t matter.”

“Then it came down here with me when I died. I didn’t know what to do.”

“You did the right thing, Benedict.” He’d been so wrong about everything. After all that, he hadn’t had to kill a monster or solve a riddle. He just had to come down here, to see how Benedict was doing. “Thank you. You are a hero. You really are. You always will be.”

Quentin laughed out loud and clapped poor Benedict on the shoulder. Benedict laughed too, reluctantly, and then not so reluctantly. Quentin wondered when the last time was that anybody laughed down here.

“It is time,” Julia said. “I am ready.”

It was. It was time to go, if that’s what she meant. But the shades didn’t seem to want them to leave. They stood around them in a semicircle, maybe a hundred of them, blocking the way back to the door. He couldn’t push his way through them, there were too many. He backed up, hoping to get the pillar in between him and the mob, trying to think. His heart leaped for a second when he spotted Jollyby sitting on the floor, maybe fifty yards away, with his good legs and his big beard. But he was just watching, too apathetic even to stand up. He wasn’t going to do anything.

The key. He could open a portal. Quentin jabbed at the air with it frantically, but it didn’t catch on anything. He couldn’t find the lock. He jabbed more vigorously and more wildly. God knew where it would take them, but anywhere was better than here.

“That won’t work down here,” someone called out, in a schoolboy English accent. “Magic doesn’t work.” It was that kid, and Quentin recognized him now. It was Martin Chatwin himself. But young—his shade looked about thirteen. That must have been what he looked like just before he became a monster, before he died for the first time.

“I don’t see your girlfriend,” Martin said nastily. “She’ll not save you.”

Maybe it was that Quentin could still die—that’s what attracted them. By killing him they could change something, do something, however terrible, that made a difference in the world above.

A couple of shades in the front row started forward, the first wave of the inevitable rush, but Benedict stepped forward to meet them and they hesitated. He grabbed a badminton racket out of somebody’s hand and brandished it at them like a sword.

“Come on, you bastards!” There he was: the warrior Benedict should have been. He assumed the perfect dueling stance he’d learned from Bingle and pointed the racket at Martin Chatwin. “Come on, who’s first?” he shouted. “You? Come on then!”

Quentin stepped up next to him, though with nothing in his hands and no magic in play, he was painfully aware that he didn’t look very dangerous. Too bad he didn’t bring a sword. He squared off and put up his fists and did his best to look like he had the faintest idea what to do with them.

“I am changing,” Julia said matter-of-factly behind him. And then she repeated, “It is time.”

Not now. Please not now. Let nothing new happen now. Quentin stole a glance back at Julia, then stopped and stared. Everyone else was staring too. Julia was taller, and her eyes had become a brilliant green. Something was happening. She was staring down at her arms with a small, deliberate frown on her face as she watched them become longer, and stronger, watched her skin take on a lustrous, pearly luminescence. It was like she’d looked in the fight at the castle, but more so. She was becoming something else.

Then she was smiling, really smiling. She looked past him at the assembled shades, and they fell back like they were facing a strong wind. Benedict gaped.

“Can you see me now?” she said.

He nodded, goggling.

She was something else now, something no longer human. A spirit? She had been beautiful before, but now she was magnificent. Something about being here must have caused her, or allowed her, to finish becoming what she’d been becoming all this time. She was as tall as Quentin now, though she seemed to be stopping there. With an air of curiosity she picked up a stick from the floor, a hockey stick it looked like. When she touched it, it grew. It came to life and became a long staff with a knobby crown. She hefted it, and the shades scrambled back even farther, even Martin Chatwin.

“Come,” she said to him. Her voice was Julia’s voice, but amplified, and with reverb. “Come fight.”

Martin didn’t come any closer. He didn’t have to, Julia came to him. In a flash, quicker than a human could move, like a poison fish striking, she had him by his shirt front. She picked him up and threw him overhand into the crowd, his arms and legs splayed out like a starfish. Her strength was surreal. Quentin wasn’t sure if she could hurt Martin—it’s not like he could die a third time—but he sure as hell must have found it daunting.

The crowd was like a soccer crowd: the front ranks scrambled back, but behind them the shades were flooding in from all directions, pushing them forward again. Their voices and the sound of their feet were loud in the enormous room. Word had gone out. Something was happening. There was no end to them. Julia could probably fight her way to the door through them, but he didn’t think she could save them all.

Julia saw it too.

“Do not worry,” she said. “It’s going to be all right.”

Quentin had said that to her on his parents’ lawn in Chesterton. He wondered if she remembered too. It certainly sounded better coming from her now.

Julia thumped the end of her staff on the floor, and then Quentin had to look away. The light was that bright. He couldn’t see, but he heard the massed shades of the underworld of Fillory gasp in unison. The light was different—it wasn’t the thin fluorescent gruel that passed for light down here, it was real rich white-gold sunlight, with all its wavelengths intact. It was like a gap had opened in the clouds.

A voice spoke.

“Enough,” it said. Or she said: it was a woman’s voice. It was a thrilling thing that harmonized with itself.

When Quentin could look again, he saw a woman standing in front of Julia, where her staff had struck the floor. She was a vision of power. Her face was lovely, warm and humorous and proud and fierce all at once. It was the face of a goddess. And there was something else there too—half Her face was in shadow. There was gravity there, and an understanding of grief. Everything will be all right, She seemed to say, and whatever is not, we will mourn.

In one hand She held a gnarled staff like Julia’s. In the other She carried, oddly, a bird’s nest with three blue eggs in it.

“Enough,” She said again.

The shades did what She said and kept still. Julia knelt in front of the goddess, her face buried in her hands.

“My daughter,” the goddess said. “You are safe now. It is over.”

Julia nodded and looked up at Her. Her face was streaming with tears.

“You’re Her,” she said. “Our Lady.”

“I have come to take you home.”

The goddess motioned to Quentin. She wasn’t glowing exactly, but it was hard to look at Her, the same way it’s hard to look at the sun—She was that intense. Only now did Quentin really register the scale of Her. She must have been ten feet tall.

The dead watched them mutely. No more Ping-Pong. For a moment the entire underworld was silent.

Julia rose to her feet, drying her tears.

“What happened to you?” Quentin said. “You’ve changed.”

“It is over,” Julia said. “I am a daughter of the goddess now. A dryad.” I am partially divine,” she added, almost shyly.

He looked at her. She looked magnificent. She was going to be all right.

“It suits you,” he said.

“Thank you. We must go now.”

“I’m not going to argue with you.”

The goddess gathered them both in with one tremendous arm. She held them, and together they all began to rise into the air. Someone cried out, and Quentin felt Benedict’s hand grab his ankle and hang on.

“Don’t leave me here! Please!”

It was like the last chopper out of Saigon. Quentin reached down to grab Benedict’s wrist and for a moment he had it.

“I’ve got you!” he yelled.

He didn’t know what he was doing, but he knew he was going to hold on to Benedict with all the strength he had. They were ten feet up, twenty. They could do this. They were going to steal one soul back. They were going to reverse entropy. Death would win the war, but it wasn’t going to do it with a perfect record.

“Hang on!”

But Benedict couldn’t hang on. His hand slipped from Quentin’s and he fell back down among the shades without a word.

Then they were flying up past the fluorescent lights, and then up through where the ceiling would have been. There was nothing more he could do. Without Benedict to hang onto, Quentin gripped the key so hard it bit into his palm. He had lost Benedict, but he wasn’t going to lose that. They rose up into the darkness, through fire, through earth, through water, and then out into the light again.